Problem: I get a situation where Firefly consumes an unexpectedly high CPU resource.

Scenario: I open the shared Firefly library in iTunes (where there’s one .m3u playlist per CD that I have ripped). After requesting & streaming the initial track the % CPU for the Firefly process goes up to abt 30% and stays there even if I stop the stream. Even if iTunes isn’t playing/streaming anything from Firefly the %CPU consumption reamins elevated. If I close the Firefly shared library in iTunes the CPU consumption by firefly goes back to <1%.

Does anyone else see this behaviour?

I do intend moving Firefly on to an Ubuntu system as a shared resource for the house but while I’ve been setting up, ripping, etc, it was easiest to host it on my main XP box.

If I move Firefly to an Ubuntu server then I might be able to do some more debug on this thru logs and actually looking at the LAN traffic but for now it seems that it’s “iTunes rather weird [behaviour] with DAAP shares” that is the problem.

If anyone else is seeing this elevated Firefly CPU hogging it’d be good to know.

The mt-daap.conf file in “c:program filesfirefly media server” has:
db_type = sqlite3
configured. But the Server Status page on the Firefly web interface says:
DB Version 2
I’ve got both sqlite.dll and sqlite3.dll in the “c:program filesfirefly media server” folder and both have exact same access time stamps.

I’ve also looked the ‘always_scan’ and ‘rescan_interval’ parameters in the config file, they are 0 and 3600 resp so I read these to mean that Firefly will only scan if a client is conected and scan at 1 hour intervals. Looking at the log file that seems seems to perform as configured.

BTW, fizze, my music library is all FLAC encoded and Firefly’s encoding to WAV. Am I right in assuming that artwork can’t be streamed with art? Most of my FLAC’s do have artwork embedded now but I don’t see any in iTunes.

You’re right about the artwork. Generally, when transcoding, no artwork is being transmitted.

The “DB version” doesn’t have anything to do with the backend, unfortunately. But 2 is alright.

Well, if it’s all flac, then I assume that the transcoding plays a part in this.
Maybe it is iTunes that tries to prefetch album art and then firefly has to do transcoding – I don’t know. But it’s very likely theres a connection between the transcoding and the cpu spikes. 😉